Mobile electronic devices are becoming ever more popular. Examples of such mobile devices include notebook computers, wireless telephones, and personal data assistants (“PDAs”). A more recent development is known as a “smartphone.” A smartphone is generally any handheld device that integrates personal information management and mobile phone capabilities in the same mobile device. Adding phone functionality to a PDA configured for wireless communication or putting “smart” capabilities, such as PDA functions, into a mobile phone are examples of smartphones.
Another burgeoning market is downloadable multimedia content from a network, such as the Internet. Examples of downloadable content include real-time music, video surveillance, audiobooks, television channels, motion pictures, video clips, and the like. As is known, some downloadable content may be compressed for transmission to conserve bandwidth. Moreover, some downloadable content may be encrypted for reasons of security or to mitigate against copyright infringement. Furthermore, downloadable content may be in a particular format, such as JPEG, MPEG, MP3, TIF, GIF, AVI, and i-Tunes compression, among other known forms of data encoding or compression. Data may also be encoded for purposes of error detection and/or correction when resolving a signal, including turbo encoding, Viterbi encoding, Hamming encoding, and other known forms of signal error detection/correction.
In order to receive and provide to a user either or both a visual or audio representation of downloadable content, a mobile device may have to decrypt, decode, or decompress, or any combination thereof, such downloadable content. Moreover, when a mobile device establishes connectivity to a network in order to access such downloadable content, power is consumed. It should be understood that power is consumed for processing of the downloadable content, as well as for network access including without limitation receiving a downloadable content transmission. Notably, as used herein, the words “include” and “including” shall mean include or including without limitation.
When not plugged into an outlet, mobile devices are limited by the extent of their battery power. Thus, a user may initiate a download of downloadable content, but due to lack of sustained battery power, such download may be interrupted. The interruption of the download of downloadable content may render the download worthless, or at least be an unwanted interruption. This is especially true for content that is purchased for download. For example, a song or a movie that is provided via a streaming download may not have been purchased by a user if the user had known that the download would not go to completion due to battery power depletion.
Accordingly, it would be desirable and useful to provide means to determine whether a download of downloadable content is more or less likely to be completed for a mobile device prior to initiating such download.